25 November 2012

The 25th of November was an important day for Yukio Mishima. I would never do what he did, but I would like to act with the same intensity and clarity.
Apart from his gifts as a writer, director, poet, actor, and militarist, Mishima was also a great prophet -- perhaps the great prophet -- of the 21st century. Along with Pasolini, he foresaw better than anyone what was around the corner.
Jay McInerny has a great essay about Mishima here:

One of the tasks of reassessing Mishima is to go back to the novels themselves, which are astonishingly diverse, and to stop seeing him as a representative figure. At the risk of robbing Mishima’s life of the perfect shape which he apparently wanted to impose on it, I’m not sure that it would hurt to try to imagine what we would make of his oeuvre if he had, say, died in a car crash, in ’68 or ’69, or of an aneurysm on his way out the door on that final day in 1970, moments after completing the first installment of The Sea of Fertility. It wouldn’t hurt to recall the Mishima that the world knew before he killed himself: an international literary figure, the most successful Japanese literary export of the twentieth century, a writer who has as much in common with Hemingway as he does with Lady Murasaki. We might do well to celebrate Mishima’s contradictions rather than seeing them as solved by his death. We need to rescue him from the mists that obscure him; we need to see him in relation to his contemporaries, like his sometimes-mentor Yasunari Kawabata, who called Mishima the kind of talent who comes along only once every two or three hundred years.

13 November 2012

Preachers and charlatans talk about the power of belief all the time. So much so that I became a classic doubting Thomas, a skeptic and kept the bullshit detector turned on high.

But Mitt Romney and Steve Jobs -- and a few other people -- have me reconsidering that.

I just finished the Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs. Famously, he was so persuasive and so seductive that people believed whatever Jobs was saying, even if it contradicted reality as we know it. Normally hard-headed engineers and finance guys would fall under this spell. Two top engineers at Pixar made a deal with each other -- as soon as one of them felt himself being sucked in to the reality distortion field, he'd signal the other one so they could avoid the danger. Kind of like Odysseus making sure his sailors plugged their ears and tied him to the mast so they wouldn't be ruined by the Siren's call.

Jobs believed in what he was saying.

I mean, look at that guy.

Jobs is the acceptable face of this quality. People of my ilk love Apple. I'm in the demo. This is a brand of hucksterism we can get behind and admire, even if we pretend not to.

I'm not in the demo for someone like Mitt Romney. Rich men don't fascinate me. In fact, I realized the bio of Steve Jobs is the only one I've read about a business guy, and for all its strengths, it was dead boring in long stretches. Too much like a day in the office.

But Romney killed the first debate. He had it going on. Belief. Romney is able to believe profoundly in whatever he says as he's saying it. This is the salesman's greatest strength. Lots of Mormons are terrific salesmen, partly because they have that evangelical year where they get doors slammed in their faces, mostly, but they do win converts. Even in the strangest of places, they'll still be able to persuade Russians, say, that Jesus appeared in the New World and that they'll get a planet of their own to rule over when they die.

Now, if you can sell a religion based on an angel named Moroni, real estate should be no big deal.

I've derided this kind of power. I also thought it was primarily a technical skill. Plus, I don't generally like salesmen. I'm kind of on the Baudelaire/Napoleon side of things. Warriors over shopkeepers, poets and priests over merchants. This is probably a fatally stupid position for someone like me who is not a general, but we're talking biases here.

Then I saw this guy speak at a sales convention for a major tech company. The Guy had been brought in from his early retirement at his Austin mansion --at God knows what amount of money -- to bring his special brand of voodoo to the sales force. The sales force needed it. The Guy was a big affable blond dude whom I'd liked right away. He was gracious and charming, even to a lowly A/V drone.

But that morning --and it was early, 8:00 AM, and he'd had to brave traffic to get there -- he was kind of pissed. The organizers brought him in at the last moment, hoping his aura would set the room on fire, and he wasn't up for it. Still, he spoke for a while, rambling on with a few personal stories.

Then he got blunt. Not in a blustery mean way, more like a dad who's setting his kid straight at 2:00 am after the kid messed up the family Honda. Just telling it like it is. This is a summary, but what he said went like this: Everyone in the industry has stuff that's more or less the same. Some of it's better at some things, some of it's not so good, but overall, it's going to work and get the job done. So it's not about product.

It's about your belief that it's the best. He mentioned some phenomenal sales team he was on, and he said the only difference was: they believed in their own product more than anyone else did. Was it better? He didn't know. No one except for a few engineers would. But what they did have was utter conviction. That's what works.

I paid attention. Not only because the Guy was, in his realm, a Napoleon himself. But also because, as a freelancer -- hell, as someone who has to get by in this shitty post-manufacturing weirdo service economy, I have to sell, too. We're all salespeople, unless you can count on a trust fund or go off the grid. So I listened and learned.

It works. That confidence move, that faking it until you make it. You can't blow off your homework, you have to prepare. But when you play the role, people often buy it. I've been surprised, knowing the holes in my story and presenations, that it went over. Because, you know, I'm still the skeptic in the corner. That didn't help

But then, Romney really thought he was going to win. Jobs was sure NeXT would carry the day. The danger is that you believe your own pitch to the point that it's not a pitch. It's you.

I lost my faith when I was fourteen and haven't found it since, so excess of belief isn't a big problem for me. I'll probably not, at this point in my life, ever be the big, bluff easy man The Guy was. But if I were a Mitt or a Steve, or if I do somehow transform into That Guy, I'll take a cue from the Romans. As their victorious generals enjoyed their triumphs, a slave in the chariot with the general would whisper 'sic transit gloria' -- all glory is fleeting.

I've joined Tumblr. Mainly, as a way to keep track of what I see on Tumblr itself, and to catch what might be inspiration.

Overall, I like the platform very much, but it tends to be hectic. I'm always looking for the next image instead of dwelling on the one in front of my eyes on the dashboard. There's a tendency, for me, to gobble it all up too quickly.

So far, my tumblr seems mostly to be trees, girls and film things. I've thought that it would be useful to have a more image-based blog and one more verbally based.

If you're interested, you can visit it here. I'll put it in the links on the side, too.